Consortium

Engineering Ingegneria Informatica S.p.A. is Italy’s leading IT group and one of the top ten IT groups in Europe, with over 6,000 employees and 40 offices in Italy, Belgium, Latin America and the USA. It is the parent company of the Engineering Group, which brings IT innovation to more than 1,000 large clients, offering a full range of services, including systems and business integration, outsourcing, cloud services, consulting and proprietary solutions.

Engineering is divided into seven business units: Finance, Central Administration, Local Administration, Healthcare, Energy & Utilities, Industry and Telecommunications, through which it supplies innovative IT solutions to the major vertical markets: Aerospace, Automotive, Banking, Defense and Space, Energy and Utilities, Professional Training, Local and Central Administrations, Security, Manufacturing, Media, International Organizations, Healthcare, Telecommunications, Transport and Pensions.

Since 1987, the company has been supported in its ability to innovate by its Central Research and Development Unit, home to around 250 researchers, spread across six offices in Italy and the rest of Europe, and currently committed to over 50 research projects co-funded by Italian and international authorities.

As consortium leader, Engineering is responsible for the entire life cycle of the DEMAND solution, from surveying user requirements to designing the software architecture and coordinating scientific publication of results. Engineering is also tasked with designing the semantic prosumer model and implementing an EMS (Energy Management System) approach to monitor and supervise the flow of energy intelligently.

Algorab is an SME specialized in remote control that has operated in information and communication technology with increasing success for 25 years. Algorab boasts a robust understanding of sectors such as networking, hardware and software design and telecommunications in general, a background that has allowed it to design monitoring and remote control systems used and appreciated throughout Italy in various fields.

The company has a strong commitment to research and is working on the following projects:

a wireless sensor network platform for smart city and environmental monitoring applications;

a virtual power plant remote monitoring and remote control platform for use in distributed co-generation (and in fuel cells in particular);

remote home assistance technologies;

environmental monitoring systems for the detection of micro-contaminants in liquids;

geofencing systems for security in the railway sector.

Algorab’s role in the DEMAND project is designing the hardware solution and developing the energy gateway firmware, with the aim of providing the necessary substrate for demand/response services. Algorab will also handle the validation of design solutions at a pilot site in the private sector.

Cupersafety is currently a leading player in the electronics industry, with specific competence in the assembly of components onto circuit boards, both as contract manufacturer and on its own account. It specializes in producing its own products in the home safety and home domotics segments (audio/video surveillance systems and home automation systems). It places particular emphasis on R&D and is currently conducting research and development on hardware, firmware and software for use in innovative wireless home automation, energy saving and sensor network systems. The company’s production equipment allows it to offer clients comprehensive services, from design to marketing, for all types of circuit boards or devices intended for any electronic application.

Cupersafety’s role in the DEMAND project will focus on network architecture and device hardware characteristics: it will analyze the requirements and define the specifications and architecture of the communication layer, design and produce prototypes, test field sensors and implementation systems and set up and test the DEMAND system at an industrial pilot facility.

Synergies between researchers in culturally similar areas at the university are what have allowed the University of Salerno’s Department of Industrial Engineering (DIIn) to make a name for itself as a scientific and cultural hub. Within the Department, research and teaching come together to act as a focal point for the local community, providing access to a wealth of basic and applied research and facilitating the pursuit of innovation, technological transfer and the dissemination and exploitation of the results of research. The Department has access to advanced analytical tools for studying and testing electrical power systems and can develop research and prototyping projects of interest at the Italian, European and international level.

The University of Salerno’s role in the DEMAND project will include:

Assessing the state of the art of software technology for actively managing electricity demand;

Defining the characteristics of individual components of the electrical system and selecting metrics;

Implementing adaptive strategies for an EMS based on artificial intelligence;

Assessing the effects of the project on energy use in a home, industrial and service sector setting and scientific dissemination of the results of the project.

DEIM (the Department of Energy, Information Engineering and Mathematical Models) was created at the University of Palermo in 2013 through the merger of two pre-existing departments: the Department of Electrical Energy, Electronics, Telecommunications, Chemical Technologies, Automation and Mathematical Models (DIEETCAM) and the Department of Energy. DEIM is home to the Palermo sections of AEIT, ANAE, CINE, CNIT, EnSiEL (the National Interuniversity Consortium for Energy and Electrical Systems), ICEMB and MESE (University Consortium for Metrics and Measurement Technologies for Electrical Systems). Over the years, various research groups at DEIM have successfully completed a number of research projects, financed using national and international funding, on the subjects of electrical power networks, energy, ICT and electronics, in collaboration with ENEL, Terna, ENEA and other entities and large companies from Italy.

In the DEMAND project, DEIM will be responsible for the first two WPs: WP1 – Preliminary analysis, state of the art, identification of areas of intervention and WP2 – Definition of specifications of services. In addition, researchers at DEIM will be actively committed to analyzing the state of the art as part of the process of searching for design solutions to be implemented, defining Demand Response services and the performance characteristics of storage systems, designing the architecture for the communication system between users and assessing the impacts of the DEMAND system on the power grid.